


Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic

by andtheyfightcrime



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen, Minor Character, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 13:30:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20471825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andtheyfightcrime/pseuds/andtheyfightcrime
Summary: Kit Holburn's first day of school does not go well.





	Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, for a season I personally don't like all that much, it certainly inspired me to write some fic. This is about Kit, a character I would have liked to know more about and who could have been another friend of Dawn's, before we were inundated with Potential Plot Devices instead.
> 
> I had optimistically planned this story to be five parts, but obviously that didn't happen. Alas, Carlos I barely knew you. 
> 
> Originally posted on LJ on September 28, 2002. Exhumed from a dusty pile (yes, this was printed out) in an even more dusty box.   
Original notes included a shout out to my friend Nora who grammar read this for excessive commas. Sorry Nora, I think added more in. As a garnish.

Monday

Kit’s favorite shade of lipstick is called Love Corrosion. It’s a deep red color, as dark as the wine that pools at the bottom of her mother’s champagne glasses. Her mother hates the color, says Kit’s mouth looks like a bruise.

Kit doesn’t care and reaches for her mother’s wallet – no one is driving her to school this morning and she needs money for the bus.

The bus driver is a plump elderly woman, one that should be at home watching her screaming grandkids. Instead, she watches Kit fumble for correct change and her gaze alights on Kit’s necklace – a gorgeous chunk of wrought metal and leather – and on Kit’s scuffed nails; the smears are still visible on her suede dress. Kit just stares until the older woman looks away.

No one sits next to Kit. Which means she can stretch out her legs and lean against the cold windowpane and survey all the passengers in the bus and watch them not-looking-at-her. Like the guy in the front, who keeps on fiddling with his tie, then looking at her legs, then sliding the ugly ring around his finger once, twice – then back to her legs. Kit smirks.

When he finally glances at Kit’s face, she’s ready for him. She smiles, a crimson tinged grin with all her teeth showing. She lifts her hand to her face and flips him off.

The man’s face reddens and he turns quickly around. If Kit was sitting closer, she imagines, she could pick out the beads of sweat forming on his skin, the incriminating bulge hidden by his suitcase.

Men are so _easy._

“Bitch.”

The name is whispered, but Kit hears it anyway as she makes her way to the exit. It’s her friend, Pervert Man, and she stops briefly by his side. Like Adam naming all the animals, she thinks and places her hand on his slightly balding head. The skin is damp and faintly warm, and her touch has galvanized him on the spot.

Kit presses down hard and says loudly, “And you’re a sad old pervert.”

Her boots make a satisfactory stomp up the aisle and then down the steps into the bright morning.

First day – Kit Holburn, 1, World, 0.

Sunlight isn’t a bad idea in theory. Kit knows there needs to be a division between night and day, but in her viewpoint that simply means time out of the house doing cool things, then sleeping at the house. School was lumped in with being away from the house by default.

Really, this excessive sunlight is going to wreak havoc on her skin – she’d burn, or worse, freckle.

Plants need sunlight, but she doesn’t. Kit looks around and everything is just as she’s heard – white building, stucco, cement and technologically efficient – with absolutely no personality. Like the people milling about her now, mass produced weeds with their brand name jeans and their tans, their summer vacations. Kit snorts and takes her necklace off. This is not a special occasion, it’s school, and for a moment, Kit wants to go home.

The moment passes, and Kit walks by an obvious freshman, all elbows and knees, who’s being talked at by Shampoo Girl. Shampoo Girl is the type of who Kit wouldn’t have ordinarily paid attention to – except that her blonde hair catches the sunlight and it hurts Kit’s eyes. The girl says something about dead…people? The freshman meets Kit’s glance and hastily looks away.

Whatever. It’s going to be the same thing anywhere Kit goes; she’s figured out that much.

Just different people saying the same lies –

“It’s a lovely morning.”

“You have such potential.”

“I’m having problems, you wouldn’t understand.”

“I love you.”

Kit wonders how long it’s going to be until the day’s over.

If there’s one thing Kit is proud of, it’s her memory. She never forgets a thing except she’s dangerously forgotten this: there is no cruelty as sharp as a teenage girl’s. She had been lulled into complacency by a Cure sticker on the girl’s pink binder, and before she knew what she was doing, she had started a conversation with her – Aimee. Aimee gives herself away by giggling and asking her if the moaning bothered her at night.

“Moaning?” Kit is trying to understand what part of the sentence she has obviously missed out on. Aimee giggles some more and says, “You know, for your dark rituals and stuff.” Her perfectly lacquered eyes sweep up and down Kit’s dark brown suede dress, the snagged fishnets and pause at Kit’s mouth. Aimee leans closer and Kit can smell the cotton candy sweetness seeping underneath the Aquanet. “I’ve never actually met a Goth, you know?”

The way Aimee says Goth is the way other girls say Freak, only elongating the ‘fre’ sound so it becomes a sentence almost: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhreeeeeeaaaaaaak, as in social outcast, emotional leper, do not pass go, victim of bad John Hughes movies _forever_, and not, as in – Really Good in Bed.

Kit wants to say the right thing, which is, “No, but the midnight goat sacrifice is still on at Breaker’s Woods, wanna come?” She’s resigned to the fact that once she stepped through the double doors, she’s entered some alien world where the rules don’t make sense and everything was a Game, and she didn’t particularly want to play.

Instead she just narrows her eyes at Aimee and says, “I’m going to pretend that I never heard that and that you have a brain.” Aimee gasps like a landed fish for a second before her nose turns up and she replies, “Well you don’t have to be so sensitive about it. Geez, it was just a question!”

I have become a MTV cliché for the Britney Spears set, Kit thinks.

Kit Holburn -1 World -1

After the third joke about her last name – Hol_burn_, I bet you’re really good with fire, Kit decides it’s a miracle that any of her classmates can actually walk under their own power and that she needs to reapply her lipstick.

Love Corrosion comes in a pewter colored tube, shaped like a bullet casing. Kit always feels vaguely dangerous carrying it around, and after all the concern and media hoopla about guns, this only intensifies. In the florescent light of the girls’ bathroom, Kit looks washed out and sharp, the henna of her hair a flat copper. Her mouth looks like a bitten plum, purple and red. She cradles the lipstick in her palm and rolls it back and forth, the motion soothing. “Yeah, I’m a bad girl,” she mock pouts. “Look at me and my slut lipstick.”

The voice rasps by her ear, gravel and dust mixed together. “You are,” it agrees. “That’s why no one will miss you when you’re gone.”

Kit doesn’t want to turn around; the hairs on the back of her neck are warning enough – because don’t animals get all prickly and nervous when there’s a predator nearby and aren’t we all animals?

The stupid human part of her brain is controlling her body, and she does turn around. She sees its eyes first – or rather, gaping sockets where eyes should have been.

It’s another girl, only she’s dead.

Kit doesn’t scream. The shock of it forces her eyes shut and when she opens them again…the girl? Ghost? Dead Person! Is gone.

When a person suffers a severe trauma, they go into shock, and sometimes they forget or repress the incident. Kit thinks this is why she must be in a stall in the haunted girls’ bathroom instead of outside screaming her head off. Her arms and legs do not want to move other than curl protectively around herself. She tries to stick her leg out, but then it started shaking, and she had to catch her balance or fall off the toilet seat. She allows herself to think I’m going to die in the girls’ bathroom…how sad, before she completely loses it and starts to sniffle.

Someone opens the door.

Kit looks into blue eyes and nearly falls off her perch with relief. Eyeballs in eye sockets, how novel. It’s the Freshman from the morning, but given that she’s just seen a _dead girl_, she can’t really trust her own eyes. She huddles again.

Not-Dead Dawn, as the girl turns out to be, grabs her hand as they fall through the hole in the floor. Kit’s delayed scream bursts from her throat now and Dawn’s scream joins it as they fall through the dark

And

Several piles of debris and clouds of dust later, Kit checks her stockings. They’re beyond salvation, and there’s a nasty scratch on her calf. Blood sticks to her fingers and joins the nail polish smears on her dress. Hopefully she’ll live long enough for another Laundry Day. Dawn hovers over her, that long limbed awkwardness translating into frenzied energy as she paces around Kit.

After reaffirming that yes, all of her limbs were attached and that she, and Dawn were both alive, she follows Dawn. Dawn calmly explains that they must be in the basement of the school, and all they need to find is the staircase. “Or, I could just take the short cut and call my sister.”

Dawn pulls out a sleek silver phone out of an inexplicable pocket and flips it open.

The phone radiates a neon green light that casts Dawn in a sickly glow. Kit wonders if her sister could do something about the dead people, but the briskness of Dawn’s actions, the way she punches in a number authoritatively, they all speak of confidence. Dawn wasn’t afraid.

Did she fall through holes often, was the next logical question.

“Buffy?”

“Your sister’s name is _Buffy_?”

People who go downstairs into basements to smoke are obviously asking for it, but Kit doesn’t feel it’s the appropriate time to bring it up. Considering they were running away in mortal terror while the trio of Undead lurched after them. The new guy keeps up with their pace and mutters something – a prayer? in Spanish. Dawn just keeps her eyes focused and says, “Look for a staircase.”

The phone rings, breaking their concentration. Carlos is so startled that he stumbles into Kit, and she grabs him by the shoulders before the momentum knocks them both over.

Then they hear someone calling Dawn’s name.

It’s Shampoo Girl.


End file.
